Animaze - Montreal International Animation Film Festival

Fantasmagorie is a 1908 French animated film by Émile Cohl. It is one of the earliest examples of traditional hand-drawn animation
and considered by film historians to be the first animated cartoon.

Émile Cohl

Georges Méliès

French filmmaker Georges Méliès is known as the first cinemagician for his early
use of special effects in cinema.Between 1896 and 1914, he directed some 531 films,
ranging from one to forty minutes in length, usually featuring single in-camera effects
throughout each entire film. In 1902, he appeared in one of his own films, l’oeuf du sorcier(The Prolific Egg),
 a groundbreaking exploration of scale, multiplication and transitions that truly sealed his reputation
as a “cinemagician” and the father of special effects in film.

Cartoonist and artist Winsor McCay (1869-1964) is often considered one of the fathers of “true” animation.
His 1911 film, Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, also referred
to simply as Little Nemo and featured here last week, contain two minutes of pure animation at around 8:11,
using sequential hand-illustration in a novel way not seen in previous films.

British filmmaker J. Stuart Blackton is credited with creating the first animation in America and was among the first in the world to use stop-motion as a storytelling technique. In 1896, Blackton, a reporter for the New York Evening World, was sent to interview Thomas Edison about his brand new Vitascope invention. In an age where wooing reporters was critical to success, Edison took Blackton to Black Maria, his studio-cabin, and created an impromptu film of Blackton doing a lightning sketch of Edison himself. Blackton became so infatuated with the technology that he soon founded the American Vitagraph Company and began producing films, debuting with The Enchanted Drawing in 1900.

In 1893, Muybridge used the phenakistoscope — an early animation device that harnessed the “persistence of vision”
principle to create an illusion of motion — to extend his visual studies to animation.